Daily Archives: August 21, 2013

It’s starting to look like QE might be indirectly responsible for a dangerously volatile situation in US financial markets. And 10-year Treasury notes hit a 2-year high following today’s Fed statement.

But, in my opinion, it’s not the intrinsic nature of the policy itself that has created the danger, but all of the ridiculous and misleading hullabaloo and punditry that has surrounded it. I don’t blame the Fed for using asset purchases to hold down long-term interest rates. But I do blame all of the market pundits and neo-monetarist theorists out there who have grossly misrepresented these asset purchases as something they are not: an all-embracing attempt to manage aggregate demand, gross spending and employment by “pumping money into the economy.”

“When the president feels the need to call out his own people for not moving fast enough on new rules for Wall Street, you know that things have really bogged down.

That’s what Barack Obama did Monday, urging top financial regulators to get going on enforcing the Dodd-Frank law, passed by Congress three years ago but still adamantly opposed by big banks.

Wall Street’s freewheeling ways and outright fraud worsened the worst financial crisis this nation has faced since the Great Depression. Nearly five years later, many large financial institutions are making big profits again, but relatively few wrongdoers have seen the inside of a prison cell.

Precious little has truly changed.

Who gets the short end of the foot-dragging? The vast majority of Americans, of course, those who aren’t favored clients of Wall Street firms. You can bet we’re the ones who will be left holding the bag if there’s another crash because proper safeguards aren’t in place.”

The big banks are desperate to prevent Janet Yellen from being appointed as Bernanke’s successor to run the Fed. Their sexist attacks have backfired. On August 1, 2013, Deutsche Bank launched the single most absurd assertion to block Yellen’s appointment. Deutsche Bank wants Larry Summers, or better yet Timothy Geithner, to (not) regulate them because not being regulated effectively is its highest priority.

“To the extent that the job has become much more international and with more regulation and supervision within the new financial world order, that makes people such as Summers and former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner compelling candidates,” says Deutsche Bank economist Joseph Lavorgna.